Sunsetting your app

If you are an app developer and you want to sunset an app, Shopify recommends the following procedures and best practices.

Sunsetting procedure

To sunset an app, the following steps are required:

Contact apps@shopify.com to have your app removed from the App Store. This will make sure no additional users sign up for your app during the sunsetting period.

After your app has been unpublished, remove it from your servers. Instead of deleting your app from your parter Dashboard, it is best practice to simply stop hosting the app on your servers.

Caution

Removing the app from your servers ensures that merchants can no longer download it. By retaining your app in the Dashboard you can reuse the same API keys should you decide to relaunch in the future; additionally, all your app historical data remains intact (revenue, number of installs, support interactions etc.).

Sunsetting best practices

When removing an app you no longer want to support, it's important to remember that a lot of grief can come to users who rely on the app. It's best to implement the following timeline as a courtesy to your users.

Two weeks before sunset

Make users aware that your app will be sunset. Two weeks before official removal you can:

Send out an email release to your users explaining the event

Post a notice in your app’s dashboard, notifying users that the app will be removed on the sunset date.